Best of 2025: Our most popular articles

By The Mindful Leader Team

We're coming up on the end of 2025, and we wanted to pull together the stuff you all engaged with most this year. We've sorted everything into three piles: articles that'll help you think differently, practices you can use, and the best of the best summit talks.

Top 3 Articles

7 Trends Shaping Mindfulness in 2025

Digs into seven big shifts we predicted coming for mindfulness in 2025—think AI meditation, those Mindfulness+ mashups, and people actually wanting to be in the same room again. Also gets you thinking about what's real, who's in charge, and who gets left out as this whole thing keeps changing.

Please Shut Up: Your Guided Meditations Are Doing Harm

Points out how a lot of guided meditations, even the good ones, can actually keep you hooked instead of teaching you to fly solo. Makes the case that too much hand-holding keeps you stuck listening for the teacher's voice instead of trusting your own awareness.

AI: Not Another Tool, But a New Human Age (And Our Minds Aren't Ready)

Digs into why AI isn't just another fancy tool, it’s more like when humans figured out farming. Except this time we're cultivating intelligence itself, not wheat. Explores what happens to work, meaning, connection, and our collective sanity as everything gets rewired.

Top 3 Exercises & Practices

Mindful Anger: 5 Steps to Turn Fury to Focus

Calls out why the usual "name it and tame it" mindfulness advice falls flat with anger. Turns out fury isn't a thought you can breathe away, it's a fire that needs to burn. Breaks down five steps to turn that heat into something constructive.

Autumn Reset: A 3-Step Reflection Practice for Letting Go

Uses autumn as a mirror for the kind of letting go —old habits, worn-out stories, even wins that are weighing you down. Offers three journal prompts to help you figure out what needs to drop so something new can grow.

POISE - A Dialectic Practice for Mindful Leaders

Breaks down a five-step practice (POISE) for handling those messy moments when you're pulled in opposite directions—like feeling guilty about delegating when you're already drowning in work. Walks you through pinpointing the conflict, honoring both sides of it, and finding a way forward that doesn't require you to betray either one.

Top 3 Summit Highlights

Building a Mindful Organization: The Blueprint

Two execs from a multibillion-dollar manufacturing company break down how they actually built mindfulness into their organization—not as feel-good fluff, but as practical shifts like circle dialogue, check-ins, and leading with care instead of fear. Turns out when you grow leaders, build real community, and stop controlling everything, you get safer workplaces, lower turnover, and better profits.

Critics vs Pioneers: Capitalism, Religion, Ethics, and the Future of Mindfulness

A summit panel where mindfulness heavyweights went head-to-head on the big questions—can mindfulness fix capitalism or does it just help us cope with it, should Buddhist-rooted practices be in schools and workplaces, and is this about personal calm or actual social change? Turns out no one agreed on much, but everyone agreed it matters how we answer these questions.

Wackfulness to Wisdom: Forging a Bold Future for Mindfulness

Mo challenges what's broken in mainstream mindfulness—the religious baggage nobody talks about, the rigid attitudes that don't match real life, and the guru worship that keeps people dependent, then lays out Open MBSR as a possible way forward. Think dialectical thinking over dogma, transparency over hidden agendas, and a community-led framework that puts power back in practitioners' hands instead of centralizing it in institutions.